Chapter 28 — More Than a Teacher: The Lord of the Sermon on the Mount (Part 4: Divine Deeds)
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
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"Wasn't Jesus just a great teacher?"
It's the most common refuge for people who want to honor Jesus without accepting his deity. From Gandhi to Jefferson to countless people today, the instinct is the same: keep the ethical teacher, discard the theological claims. Give us the Sermon on the Mount without the resurrection. Give us the Golden Rule without the Trinity.
Part 4 of The Incarnate Christ and His Critics shifts focus to what Jesus did, the "D" in HANDS. If he's really God, we'd expect him not just to receive divine honors and bear divine names, but to do what God does. And the place to start is his teaching, because even there, even in the most "ethical" portion of his ministry, Jesus turns out to be far more than a teacher.
The Sermon and its Astonishing Authority
The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) is the most famous extended teaching of Jesus, and it's rightly been admired across cultures and centuries. Its ethical vision (love your enemies, forgive those who wrong you, give without drawing attention to yourself, trust God with your anxieties) is breathtaking in its depth and difficulty.
But how Jesus teaches in the Sermon matters just as much as what he teaches.
Again and again, he says: "You have heard that it was said... but I say to you." He isn't quoting Scripture and commenting on it, the way the rabbis and scribes did. He places his own word alongside, and above, the law given through Moses. "It was said" points to the authoritative tradition of Jewish law. "But I say" is Jesus setting his own word above it.
No prophet ever spoke this way. The prophets consistently said, "Thus says the Lord." Their authority was derivative; they were messengers, not sources. Jesus doesn't say "Thus says the Lord." He says "I say to you." He speaks in his own name, on his own authority.
Matthew notes that after the Sermon, "the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes" (Matt. 7:28-29). The contrast is deliberate. The scribes derived their authority from a chain of tradition. Jesus derived it from himself.
The Judge of All Humanity
One of the most startling moments in the Sermon comes at the end, in Matthew 7:21-23:
"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.'"
Jesus presents himself here as the judge who decides who enters God's kingdom. Not an advocate before God's judgment seat. Not an intercessor. The judge himself. The eternal destiny of every human being turns on whether Jesus knows them.
No human teacher has ever made this kind of claim without being considered delusional. No prophet ever said, "On the final day, I will be the one who decides who enters God's kingdom." This is the language of God acting as the final judge, a role the Old Testament reserves for YHWH alone (Ps. 9:7-8; 96:13; Eccl. 12:14).
What kind of teacher is this?
"LIKE a Wise Man Who Built His House on the Rock"
The Sermon ends with a parable about foundations: those who hear and do Jesus' words are like a wise builder; those who hear and ignore them are like a foolish one who built on sand (Matt. 7:24-27). The flood comes, and only the house on the rock survives.
Notice what the rock is: Jesus' words. Not "Scripture" in general. Not "good values." His specific teaching is the foundation on which eternal security is built or lost.
This is the language of absolute authority. Not a teacher pointing you toward truth, but a teacher who is the truth, whose word is the ground of all things.
The biblical scholar Robert Stewart puts it plainly: "The person of Jesus stands behind and gives authority to the moral and ethical teaching that Jesus offered." The ethics of the Sermon on the Mount only make sense if Jesus is who he claims to be. If he's merely a wise rabbi, you can take or leave his teachings. If he's the eternal Lord, his words are the words of God, and they judge those who receive or reject them.
The Bottom Line
The dominant view in our culture is that Jesus was a teacher of spiritual and moral values, mistakenly deified by a later, less sophisticated church. But the Sermon on the Mount, the very part of Jesus' teaching most universally admired, is itself evidence against that view.
The teacher of the Sermon speaks with God's authority, forgives sins, judges eternal destinies, and demands that his teaching be the foundation of a person's life. Great human teachers don't do that. God does.
He was the Word of God, teaching.
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